Is the Creation story a projection of human nature?

Answer

Dear Daniel,

A very interesting question! Although, of course, there is no “scientific” answer to it and your hypothesis is as plausible as any other that is expressed between pot and pint. Still, I want to go a little deeper into the structure of your argument: a projection theory. Others are probably better placed to answer your question, but since projection theories interest me immensely, I’ll give you the following thoughts anyway.

Before I start I would like to point out that the wording of your question was a bit unclear to me. You say that “man got the idea that he created something, when we know that the chair he has made is only transformed matter.” So man got an idea, but that idea was wrong according to you? If man nevertheless got that idea, then it is not necessary for him to develop an image of God, is it? I’m just assuming that the wording of your question may not be entirely consistent with what you meant.

One of the best-known projection theories is that of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach as he developed it at length in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841). Anyone who knows anything about philosophy will probably tell you that Feuerbach asserted that: “God was a projection of man, and therefore we ourselves are what we ascribe to God.” Yet this very short formulation does not do justice to the complexity of what Feuerbach meant.

He was concerned, among other things, with a critique of “egoism”, an attitude he associated with “creating out of nothing” (the creation story). Someone who thinks from “a creation from nothing” sees reality as his property with which he can do whatever he wants. Religion thus legitimizes “egoism”, according to Feuerbach. Yet the “essence” of religion is something else, but that otherness emerges only when we refer to ourselves the projection of our “inner being” on God, and do not see ourselves as one person separate from all the rest. That is what God is according to Feuerbach, an isolated “I”. By dragging the “I” out of its heaven and bringing it back to earth, we make it into a general principle: man. Not the individual man as an individual person (because that was our God), but man as a “kind of being”. So we can see ourselves as what we “really” are: “members” of humanity. It all sounds very humanistic, of course, despite the filthy anti-Semitic undertone of Feuerbach’s argument…

In short, maybe you can open up your own projection theory a bit? Your audience will certainly thank you for it and will certainly consider you an equally great “spout”. If I were to follow your reasoning, aren’t we projecting other abilities on god besides the ability to “create”? Or rather, is your explanation sufficient to explain any image of God, or at most the fact that almost every religion has a creation story…

Moreover, you should consider whether it is at all the case “that in the course of time man got the idea that he created something, while we know that the chair he has made is only transformed matter.” For I think that someone who makes a chair does “create” a chair, and the fact that he does so from matter, while distinguishing him from the god in the creation story, does not detract from his “creation”. not that a sculptor who makes a statue out of a piece of marble, then pulls his hair out afterwards and, out of sheer frustration at not having created the stone himself, develops some kind of image of God. .

The question of “who” or “what” created the earth, matter, etc. does not seem to me to be the right question either, but I think it simply stems from the cliché of “philosophical wonder” (“where does what I have around me come from? go, look away?”) and not so much from the fact that from a certain moment man “got the idea that he created something” and then afterwards possibly became frustrated because he then turned out not to be creating himself.

I hope I was able to “contradict” your “self-righteousness” a bit?

Kind regards,

drs. Widukind De Ridder